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A rare double publication day for me. First up, The Ceremony, a gender-bent Sleeping Beauty tale of ritual and regime, up at Fireside Fiction. Second, The Water Beating Against Your Skin, in Twisted Moon Magazine, a poem about water and springs and what can be found there.

Time for the obligatory end of year round up of Various Things I Published/Was Involved in During 2017, a year where we learned that if you don’t write all that much in 2016, you won’t publish all that much in 2017.

I know. Who would have thunk?

But it wasn’t a completely empty year either, including, as it did:

One novella:

Probably the publication I was proudest of this year, an epic, novella length poem (yes, about 28,000 words), Through Immortal Shadows Singing, published by Papaveria Press.

You Will Never Know What Opens, in Lightspeed Magazine, December 2017. Portal fantasy. Hasn’t been out long enough to garner that many responses, but Charles Payseur was kind enough to give a thoughtful review here.

We Need to Talk About the Unicorn in Your Back Yard,Daily Science Fiction, April 2017. Humor. Possibly my most popular short fiction piece from last year. An audio version is coming up from Toasted Cake, but in the meantime, if you missed it, it’s a short read. I promise.

The Witch in the Tower, Fireside, July 2017. One of my personal favorites from the year. Another little fairy tale.

“Gingerbread Smoke,” in Typhon: A Monster Anthology Vol 2., by Pantheon Magazine. This was probably the hands down hardest piece of mine to find this year, bar none, but I promise: the anthology really truly is available through Amazon now, and is forthcoming from other outlets shortly, and the anthology overall is well worth the hunt.

On Fairy Tales: A weekly essay series on Tor.com discussing fairy tales and various works inspired by fairy tales.

The Pixar Rewatch. A sequel to the 2015-2016 Disney Read-watch, this monthly essay series on Tor.com explored the Pixar movies – discussing development and financial details, animation, other tidbits and of course the films themselves.

The Secret of NIMH. Another add-on to the Disney Read-watch, this essay appeared over at Uncanny, and focused on Don Bluth and his first animated picture.

And speaking of the Disney Read-watch, the very last post in that series – a wrap-up post – appeared in January 2017, making the entire series – technically – still eligible for Best Related Work awards.

You can also get a copy of the issue for $3.99, or, better yet, buy a year’s subscription for $35.88 – which is a savings of about 25% off the cover price.

I had a horrible time trying to figure out a title for this story. That’s not one of my skills to begin with – thus the questionable titles for many of my pieces – but this one was particularly difficult. I finally submitted the piece under the title “The Doors,” only to have the editor, John Joseph Adams, tell me that the title was not very good.

I couldn’t argue the point, and focused on coming up with more titles. Alas, the Lightspeed editors were equally unenthusiastic about:

“You Are Incapable of Summing Up This Story with a Decent Title”

“For the World Is Hollow and I Can’t Think of a Title”

and the one I still kinda regret not going with

“Hamlet, Because That’s Been a Pretty Successful Play, and Maybe the Title Is Why”

And now that I think that everything due out this year is out, time for the obligatory end-of-year round up post.

For the second year in a row, my most popular work seems to have been in the non-fiction/Best Related Work category, specifically the Disney Read-Watch over at Tor.com, which wrapped up this year with a post on Moana. No word yet on whether I’ll be covering future Disney feature length animated films – my best guess is maybe – but I will be continuing with two additional projects in 2017.

Those posts ended up eating considerably more time than I’d expected, but still, although this was (apart from those posts) not a good year for writing, it was a decent year for publication: nine short stories, four flash fiction pieces, and seven poems.

If you missed them earlier, here’s a list:

Short fiction:

Deathlight, Lightspeed Magazine, May 2016. Arguably the story that garnered the widest range of responses from readers, it was also the one hard science fiction story I managed to publish this year.

The Huntsmen, Truancy, with part one published in March 2016 and part two in December 2016 (part one has a link to part two.)

“Mistletoe and Copper,” An Alphabet of Embers, Stone Bird Press, July 2016. The anthology is available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and is eligible for the Locus Award for Best Anthology, as are two other collections listed below – Clowns: The Unlikely Coulrophobia Remix and Fae Visions of the Mediterranean.

Coffee, Love and Leaves,Capricious SF, July 2016. Coffee appeared in a number of tales on this list, but in only one title.

I gotta be honest here: when I sent this one off, I had a bad feeling that it might signal – pardon the pun – the end of what’s been a pretty decent relationship with Daily Science Fiction. On the other hand, it has this sentence:

If I were a bitter person, I’d say that that my Cat Signal fell on the wrong clowns.

The editors still seem to be speaking to me.

Flash fiction:

“The Game,” in Clowns: The Unlikely Coulrophobia Remix, January 2016. Available at Amazon or Barnes and Noble. The one story on this list loosely based on a real event. Very loosely based.

“The Heart of the Flame,” in Fae Visions of the Mediterranean, May 2016. Possibly the least read piece I published this year, in an anthology that I think deserved a lot more attention, and which is still available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

“Madrepore,” in Spelling the Hours, July 2016. Arguably the second least read piece I published this year, this is part of another project deserving of attention: a chapbook of poems celebrating women scientists. It’s available from Amazon, and is one of my few poems that explores marine biology.

Ice/Shadow, in Strange Horizons, December 2016, the hands down trickiest poem to write this year and probably the one the I was proudest of, though I’m also deeply fond of “The Heart of the Flame” for purely personal reasons.